I decided to 'upgrade' to etch today. At the time, i was running sarge (stable) with the 2.6.8 kernel. This is what I did:

1. change sources.lst
2. apt-get update
3. apt-get upgrade
4. apt-get dist-upgrade

At some point, there were erros with respect to udev that i couldn't resolve until finding a thread here on LQ. That thread recommended, and i did:

1. manually download and install linux-image-2.6.12 with dpkg
2. apt-get -f install
3. apt-get update
4. apt-get upgrade

Now everything is clean! or seems to be.

My questions:

1) Will 'etch' not run the newer kernel?

2) By performing dist-upgrade under the 2.6.8 kernel, have i now mucked things up by 'reverting' to 2.6.12?

3) Should i do another apt-get dist-upgrade using the 2.6.12?

Thanks!

There should be no problems running the 2.6.12 kernel in etch because it's available in the official etch repository. You can "apt-get install" the kernel-image, there's really no reason at all to download & install it manually unless you, from some strange reason, prefer to do it that way.

No you haven't. Etch is a development branch and it's quite normal to upgrade packages to newer versions in etch. In Debian stable the package versions stay unchanged. (That's one of the reasons why it's called stable.)

Yes you should. Etch is a development branch and sometimes the dependencies for packages change from one version to another. "apt-get upgrade" doesn't handle such changes but "apt-get dist-upgrade" does. So it's actually preferable to use "apt-get dist-upgrade" in etch. If you use only "apt-get upgrade", apt-get will complain when it finds packages with changed dependencies and it will refuse to upgrade them until you run "apt-get dist-upgrade".

Thank u for the reply!

Pehaps Im missing something...

I assumed that 2.6.8 is newer than 2.6.12. Is this not the case?

2.6.12 is newer. The 2.6 kernel series began with 2.6.0 and then came 2.6.1 and so on. After they reached 2.6.9, the next version was 2.6.10 (and then 2.6.11 and 2.6.12).

shucks....

I cant count.



That makes too much sense!

Kool and the gang, Thanks to you!